Seasons

I think the first idea is roughly how Daisy and Billy work, isn't it? Needs massively more space and power to really succeed, but it'll come in time - we'll have cheap as chips multi-Tb storage, multi-THz processors and multi-Gbit broadband by 2020.

And of course "assuming the user talks with proper grammar" doesn't take account of the various Leeds flies that are bound to end up in the proverbial ointment if it's online and chatting freely. And if it isn't, it's going to take an awful lot of man-hours as a one-man DIY project.

I don't know why Daisy-esque bots can't handle preformatted conversation, but when I feed her Shakespeare, her responses become scene-sized and still incoherent (splendidly florid, admittedly.) It ought to be possible to train NLP bots with cut+paste data, but I haven't found a way yet.

its not such a large DIY project. Just make a "suggest" program that suggests the rest of a sentence based on past consecutive occurances, and adapt it into a bot. using Visual Basic, i succesfully created the suggest proram but when i tried to turn it into a bot, i stumbled on dealing with the database file and coding instructions for special cases such as end of file conditions where there is not consecutive occurances. The result was a bot that learns efficiently like daisy and talks incoherently like billy. Sometimes I got some intelligable talk out of it, but most of the time it was mish mash. that is probably because I did not write the program properly.

And, for some reason it only recognises data learned while the program is running, it can't seem to start at the begining of the database. again, probably a coding error. The second idea on the other hand, will require a colossal amount of data and processing power, since it has to record the entire database squared - for each word it has to make an association record for each other word in the database and has to update everything every time the user talks. That can be avoided by using a spreadsheet type database where instead of making colossal records, it can work like a times table, with the association values between words in the box where the two words meet. that would save a lot of disk space and speed requirement.

all in all, an online version of such a bot would be interesting, to watch how its vocabulary and coherence evolves.

Whens the next Bot-holiday?

They're random. Not even the Professor knows when they'll happen.

Really? How often does it happen, like every month?

Every day has a 1/10 chance of being a holiday, as I recall.

1/10? thats too high of a chance for me!

Speaking of taking chances...did everyone read about Sony's use of rootkit digital rights managments on it's CDs? http://www.sysinternals.com/Blog/

It seems you don't have to press an "I accept" button on the EULA for it to install itself, and trying to unistall it can mess up your computer. It makes me kind of glad I don't buy CDs anymore.

iTunes is almost as bad. These days, there's just no (legal) way to get music without letting lord-knows-who onto your machine.

Pffft. Legal? No thank you. I'll take burning stuff from my friends CD collections and off file-sharing networks any day.